Market buzz: Stocks hold higher going into long weekend

1514: Spanish PM says he will not call early elections (despite the high political cost in terms of plummeting levels or approval in the polls).

1330: US durable goods orders declined at a 1.7% pace month-on-month in April (Consensus: -1.4%), following an unrevised increase 2.7% increase.

1329: While the current expansion is now the second-longest on record, it has fallen short of the 'average' historical magnitude by six percentage points. On that basis, Credit Suisse says a recession is unlikely until the third quarter of 2020. Its forecasts call for an inversion of the Treasury yield curve in mid-2019, which implies the economy entering recession towards the middle of 2020.

1327: Spanish bond yields are jumping higher, with that on the 10-year Treasury note jumping 10 basis points to 1.50%. That follows the indictment of the ex-Treasurer of the country's ruling PP party on charges of embezzlement, with the court ruling that the party itself also illegally financed itself to the tune of roughly £200,000.

Nevertheless, in Spain's highly-charged political environment and following egregious episodes of corruption that came to light in the PP (and other parties, especially in Catalonia) in recent years, local press reports indicate that the government in Madrid is coming under significant pressure to call early elections.

Indeed, already in 2017, the centre-left PSoE, far-left Podemos and the main nationalist parties had already tried to force the PP out of power, going as far blocking the passage of the annual government budget despite warnings of the toll it would take on the economy.

1228: Dunelm warns it has recently encountered "materially more challenging" trading conditions after what was "a good performance" in the first three quarters of the year.

1129: Economist Kallum Pickering at Berenberg has published a report analysing the UK’s economic performance since the Brexit vote, suggesting how GDP can pick up in the medium and long-term.

UK's wobbly start to the year was confirmed this morning Pickering agrees the very weak Q1 reading "probably overstates" the underlying weakness in growth momentum at the start of the year. The BoE expects future data revisions to show that the economy expanded by 0.3% qoq in Q1, a little below its potential rate of circa 0.4% as seen in the fourth quarter of 2017.

In his report Pickering estimates that the UK has lost around £35bn of cumulative output between the third quarter of 2016 and the first quarter of 2018.

"Fading Brexit risks" in 2018 and 2019 can support demand growth, he suggests, and if the UK avoids a hard Brexit, the reduced uncertainty should allow household and business risk appetite to normalise, enabling higher levels of investment and stronger consumption growth in 2019 and beyond, with a base case of GDP growth rising from 1.4% in 2018 to 1.8% in 2019.

In the long-run, the outlook largely depends on the future trading arrangement between the UK and the EU, UK domestic economic policies, and any future non-EU trade deals. Four potential Brexit scenarios range from a hard Brexit where there would be less than 1.5% potential growth, to the 2.1% from a no-Brexit scenario, with "soft Brexit" and "semi-soft" in between varying from 1.5% to 1.9% growth.

0930: UK GDP growth unrevised at up by 0.1% on the month for the first quarter.

0900: Germany's closely-followed IFO business confidence index printed at 102.2 for the month of May (consensus: 102.0).